Author: Jason

A couple of my personal favourites from the festival are these two. The first in particular which to me summarises the type of ‘camping’ involved at the Glastonbury Festival (especially with my background teaching kids about lightweight hiking with the DofE Award scheme for many years):

The various photos I’ve been taking throughout the ImagineCup2008 Worldwide Finals are now uploading to these livespaces account.

If you’d like to publish the photos of yourself from this portfolio elsewhere, for non-commercial purposes only, that’s fine, just please ensure you credit me (with a web-link where applicable) wherever you use them (ie on facebook, myspace, etc). I do however now also have all of these photos from the Imagine Cup 2008 on my facebook account. Just search for ‘Jason Parlour’ and you should find me.

If you’d like to use any of these images commercially, ie on a business/photography website or similar, please get in contact directly to discuss, and I’m sure we can reach an amicable arrangement pretty quickly and cheaply as applicable.

(NB. If you work for Microsoft, and you want to use them on a Microsoft website/blog, there’s no need to get in contact prior to making a copy, just please let me know where they’re being used, and again, make the relevant photo credits when using them 🙂 )

Of course, if you’d like any high resolution copies of any of these images (up to around 3822×2592 pixels, big enough for an A3 print), just let me know which one(s) (ideally by sending a thumbnail copy, or the image reference number) and I can get a copy sent/uploaded for you pretty promptly.

Having very recently been getting more into the joys of blogging, I will be aiming to keep a blog up-to-date in the future.

However, despite the free livespaces accounts being really great for hosting all my images (particularly when as yet, there’s no maximum memory limit), and I’ll also be keeping use of the superb free SkyDrive so editors and the like can download their preferred images in maximum resolution, my blog for the near future will be hosted on my website.

Do feel free to comment, and I look forward to hearing from you there!

Well the photography entries are in, and the judges will now have made their decisions (although we won’t be finding out the results until tomorrow evening).

It’s been a real pleasure to be here, and I’m very grateful to have met some really amazing people throughout my time in Paris, and experience some of that uniquely French & Parisian culture. It’s even been great to try and recall my G.C.S.E. French from 16 years ago!

I’ll be publishing a big stock of images on my livespaces account very soon after I return to the UK, which will be accessible through this link

The Glastonbury Festival was superb. Such amazing people and a great chance to find out much more from the ‘Green Fields’ (photos to follow). Of course wonderful to spend some more quality time with my partner, and enjoy the time outdoors.

I’ve also just helped Jolene redesign her website for Purity, as she’s moving into a new studio in August 2008 (the photo in her logo was one of mine from some dancing she was doing at an Art Gallery last year).

Thankfully, with her new studio, I’ll also get the chance to use part of the studio on occassion as a photography studio, which has both some nice indoor, and outdoor locations.

It’s being refitted and replastered at the moment so it’s all crisp and new looking. Can’t wait!

However, I’m now currently sat in the Novetel hotel in Paris however, as part of the Imagine Cup worldwide finals. As you may see I was lucky enough to win the UK finals, and as a result, also now have the opportunity to compete against 5 other teams for the additional prizes.

The city looks pretty amazing, very classic architecture, and some very mad drivers.

Apparently if you take a look at the Imagine Cup website while we’re here, you should be able to get some feedback on what everyone’s up to.

I’ve just come back from the ‘opening ceremony’ with Paris’s Mayor, meeting some really interesting people from Microsoft in the process too, some developers, evangalists, previous imagine cup winners, ex interens, full time employees, etc. There’s even a bunch of guys who converted a car to run on chip fat oil, who’ve just arrived from driving to Paris from Dublin!

Having just spotted these couple of articles on the web today, I thought this would be a good place to share it:http://www.getreading.co.uk/…top_photography_prize
Unfortunately, there is a bit of a typo, in that I’m not actually going to get work experience out in Seattle as a result of this round of the competition… but it’s not the end of the competition yet!

I’m also off to the Glastonbury Festival this weekend, and will be using this as a further test run for the finals. It should also be an amazing time away, especially as the weather doesn’t actually look too bad!

I’ve been passionate about finding excellent photographers after being introduced to some photos taken by a press photographer David Fleming, for the Sunday Telegraph, back in 2003… there was just ‘that something’ about them that really captured the moment, the emotion, and the feeling of the day.I’d say this was this photographer who inspired me to really try and have great images for the commercial photos I needed at various times. (Unfortunately his original website no longer exists)

Although I was keen on taking photos whilst out in New Zealand back in 1996, whilst working for a Mount Aspiring College, (an amazing secondary school based in the middle of the Southern Alps in the wonderful village of Wanaka). After my compact zoom 35mm camera stopped working in around 1999, it took me until December 2007 to finally make a choice on which digital SLR to buy! It just seemed that every time I waited a few months, the price would come down, and the quality would go up!

I finally settled on the Cannon EOS 40D, with a really lovely EF series 24-105mm lens. It was a tough choice between that and the Canon EOS 5D, but I’m glad I made the choice. The 6.5 frames per second have been brilliant for capturing action shots of my dog, Mr Bones (as seen in the pets section). And the resolution and aperture settings have just been superb.

So subsequently, whilst chatting to someone over lunch one day a few weeks later, I heard about the Microsoft student competition of the ‘imagine cup’.
The challenge was to take a series of up to 10 photos, which enlightened the theme ‘Imagine a world where technology enables a greener future’. Thankfully, on the 23rd May 2008, I discovered I’d actually won the UK competition, and am now one of 6 finalists from around the world now competing in the finals in Paris this July! 🙂